Texas utilities announce end to rolling blackouts, though some power outages remain

FORT WORTH, Texas — ERCOT and Oncor announced early Thursday they have stopped large rolling blackouts across the state, though officials clarified rotating outages could be necessary if the electric grid runs into another problem.

As of 11 a.m., around 40,000 customers in Tarrant County and 30,000 in Dallas County were without power, according to Oncor’s outage map. Hundreds of thousands of Texans on Thursday were awaiting power due in part to damage from Wednesday’s winter storm that dropped a second round of snow in many areas across the state, Oncor said in a Twitter thread. There was also some damage to equipment from earlier storms and damage caused by record low temperatures.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas on Wednesday directed Oncor and other utilities to begin restoring power dropped from the electric grid, Oncor said. As a result of “increased generation and stable demand,” Oncor said, the agency stopped controlled rotating outages Thursday.

But in a virtual press conference on Thursday, ERCOT President Bill Magness said, “If we do hit a bump and have some generation have to come back off, we may have to ask for outages.”

“But if we do, we believe they’ll be at the level where they could be rotating outages,” Magness said. “Not the larger numbers that we faced earlier this week.”

There’s still work to be done, he added, “but customers should be seeing the light and the heat coming on, if they haven’t been seeing it.”

ERCOT declared Texas was at its highest energy emergency level on Monday, as people across the state were cranking up heat due to record low temperatures, pushing the grid beyond its limits. That’s when ERCOT announced rotating outages would begin.

ERCOT said in a news release Thursday morning the agency made “significant progress overnight” to bring back customer’s power. ERCOT Senior Director of System Operations Dan Woodfin said in the release, “We will keep working around the clock until every single customer has their power back on.”

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